Veterans Healing Farm Soil Regeneration Project
Since 2015, Veterans Healing Farm has donated over 35,000 pounds of produce to veterans and their caregivers at the Charles George VA Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina
Welcome and please consider donating to support the Veteran Healing Farm's Soil Regeneration Project. Your financial gift will increase Veteran Healing Farm's capabilities to maintain healthy soil to grow great food and flowers to support the mind, body, and soul of our veteran community.
This project is a collaboration of Veterans Healing Farm, The Redesign ML-43 Leadership Team (Sarah Fiel, Maxine Howard, Kelly Gallant, Jay Mercado, Jared Brindle, Volkan Aksakal, and Cooperate WNC Director Zev Friedman), and Cooperate WNC.
By contributing, you are supporting our effort to fundraise for and do the physical work to apply soil amendments and biochar to Veterans Healing Farm's field, increasing the productivity, nutrient density and medicinal potency of the foods and medicines that are grown by and for Vets.
Your donation will support:
* Fabrication of a Kon-Tiki biochar kiln (working with Living Web Farms in Mills River) to allow VHF to produce biochar for this project and many future biochar applications at the VHF site and for other community farms in the area
* Organic fertilizers and mineral amendments for application this year
* Biochar for application this year
* Covercrop seed for winter and spring covercropping needs
We appreciate your generous support in helping to fund this work.
About Biochar
Biochar is charcoal that has been made from a renewable biomass source such as bamboo, nut shells, or waste wood from a milling operation, then saturated with compost, manure or other sources of nutrients. Due to its porous structure, biochar acts like a sponge and a battery in the soil, holding nutrients and water for when plants need them, thereby making plants more resilient to extreme weather events and also creating more nutrient dense foods. In addition, since charcoal is mostly composed of carbon that has been gathered by plants from the atmosphere via photosynthesis, when charcoal is buried in the soil as biochar it is sequestering carbon out of the air and into the soil for for hundreds or thousands of years, thereby reducing atmospheric CO2 and helping reduce the severity of climate change.
Kon-Tiki biochar video courtesy of Ithaka Institute